So, I came across this great page, Frontierverse, which has download links for all the versions of Frontier Elite which were released out as shareware. So what is cool, is that using the AROS Kickstart replacement ROM, it’ll boot up and work!

Just be sure to increase the default amount of chip memory, as it seems the AROS Kickstart ROM consumes more RAM than the Commodore ROM. But heck the AROS ROM is opensource, and free!

Pretty cool, and more interesting than say the normal, yippie a view of the AROS cat..

AROS Kickstart ROM

Again very cool stuff!

And lastly, I slapped together a disk that’ll boot up aclock, although it works only with a Kickstart 2 or higher ROM.. 1.3 kinda freaks out, and I didn’t feel the need to go all over the top on this one. Booting the aclock disk with the Aros ROM though loads up, but the clock doesn’t tick..

On OS X, I’ve been using the FS-UAE emulator to some degree of success, I’ve found it a tad cumbersome for swapping floppy disks, and I’ve had a major issue where making updates on an ADF that while they all look like the changes are reflected, going to the filesystem proved otherwise. So I wound up having to make DMS disk images, and running some ancient MS-DOS program to convert DMS to ADF‘s. Naturally the compression programs were in turn.. compressed. So with enough fooling around with various archivers I found here, I was finally able to get where I needed to be.

At the same time, looking at how the AROS kickstart replacement ROM is quite capable, it may be time to revisit AROS, and I would imagine it has become far more capable than that last time I had looked at it.

Another update by David Braben about the future of Frontier Dangerous and Chris Robberts of Wing Commander fame.

Interesting take on one project that met its goals, and another that is half way in terms of time and ‘donations’ … Or more importantly the return of the space combat genre, and of course the ultimate ‘sandbox’ being in the scope of an entire galaxy.

There has been some buzz about for years (decades?) about a new Elite game. Sure the Frontiersequels were simply amazing, but now that PC’s are far more advanced than they’ve ever been, what would Elite look like today?

So here is a small taste!

Unlike other video games, there has been a movement afoot of the end customer directly financing the upstart cost for projects to get them off the ground. The idea being that people themselves may be interested in a product, and they can cut out the middle men of marketers & financiers, and do so in a mob fashion. Kickstarter is one of many sites built for this purpose.

So I was surprised to find that David Braben (Of recent Raspberry Pi fame), had started one for the future of Elite, right here. He is trying to raise a hefty £1,250,000 to directly fund this new version of Elite. Right now he is £683,487 short but has 41 days to go. I would imagine that one of the reasons of why they want to go this way, is that during the Frontier days when GameTek went bankrupt, leaving much of their distribution and marketing in the air.

Is this madness? Maybe a tad, but the original developers behind Wing Commander managed to fun their project, Star Citizen on Kickstarter as well!

Well I couldn’t resist. Currently there is no keyboard input, but after hacking the ObjectiveC from UAE, I was able to get GLFrontier to compile and run it’s intoduction under NeXTSTEP 3.3 on VirtualBOX…

I guess I’ll have to break down and order some new hard disks, and a PCI video card to rebuild me a whitebox.

While I was busy fiddling with my Commodore 64, a friend of mine got an Amiga in high school. The 64 was cool, but I was simply blown away by the Amiga. To say there was a gulf between the 8 bit machine, and the quasi 32/16 bit machine would be a massive understatement. His Amiga 2000 could do all kinds of neat things, from talk, run IBM XT software at 100% speed via a “bridge board”, not to mention play super snazzy games. It took me a few years to save up to buy my very own Amiga 500, and once I was ready I didn’t have enough money for a bus ride home, so I walked the FIVE miles home toting my Amiga! I was so happy to say the least!! (At least it was summer, it was flat, and there weren’t any tropical waves/hurricanes around…)

While there are a few emulation alternatives for running the old m68000 software on all kinds of machines, I’m going to talk about AROS today.

AROS is to AmigaDOS what Wine is to Windows. Once it became clear that Commodore was going to die, and that AmigaDOS and the Amiga were lost a few brave people decided that they had to take matters into their own hands. Sadly there was lots of in fighting, a tradition of the comp.sys.amiga.advocacy news group where some people get too tied into little details and let little things (like the rise of Microsoft Windows) pass them by. At any rate, Aaron Digulla knuckled down, and start to write a bug for bug clone of AmigaDOS 3.1 in C to run on the IBM PC. The result of which is AROS. It currently will either run hosted on Linux/NetBSD or natively on the i386. There is a port to the Amd64 undergoing right now. AROS even has SDL support.

So this got me thinking..

What if I were to remove all the OpenGL calls from GLFrontier, and ran it as a strictly 2d app on AROS?

So I took the first step, and I trimmed out the OpenGL support from Tom’s fix of Frontier, so it’s completely SDL 2d friendly, and cross compiled it to AROS. I built the first pass on MinGW, and got frame rates of upwards of 1000 on Vista 64!

Now for the fun part of building an AROS version. While there is now a native GCC for AROS it cannot compile the assembly listing from GLFrontier.. I suspect it’s a heap overflow. This means you have to cross compile. I have cygwin installed in a Windows 2000 VM I use with Virtual PC 2007. I’m not sure if cygwin installs on Vista, let alone Vista 64, however I do suspect it MAY have issues… I keep my dev stuff in a VM so I can move it around without losing my settings.

I downloaded and unpacked the following files into my cygwin installation:

And the SDL include directory from cygwin.. I think its SDL version 1.2

I did have to find all the ‘exe’ files and make sure they were chmoded +x as the compiler would not run (chmod +x /usr/local/bin/exe /usr/local/i386-aros/bin/ /usr/local/lib/gcc-lib/i386-aros/3.3.1/*exe ). Once you are ready you should be able to build files with

i386-aros-gcc

I’m not sure how to build stripped files, but I suspect it’s out there somewhere. At any rate, I did this to compile my SDL 2d version of FrontierGL:

*REMEMBER as68k has to actually run on the host machine, so it needs to be native, you cannot use a cross compiler for that. However you do cross compile it’s output.

Naturally you’ll now want to run your exe!

For testing the binaries you’ll need some kind of Aros system, I recommend WinAROS, it’s a pre-built Qemu package, so the disk will work on all kinds of platforms. You can download it here: WinAros Developer

This is a pretty snazzy setup, I recommend booting into a 32bit depth display option, however you will want to modify the default script to look like this at the last line:

Last add the following line to your user-startup
Execute Extras:Networking/Stacks/AROSTCP/S/startnet.

Now reboot. Open a shell and verify that you have a connection with “ifconfig -a”
You can also try to ping a website, but you might not get any return packets because of QEMU’s built in firewall. You should at least see the ip address for the site you ping. Or ping 10.0.2.2 to make sure you network is communicating with Qemu.
Now for the final moment, put your exe on a web server, and simply use wget to get it! I’d recommend zipping up your work directory, so it includes the ‘bin’ file, and the structure that GLFrontier expects. I like the zip file format as WinAROS includes unzip.

I do the following from AROS

Wget http://192.168.1.10/front.zip
Unzip front.zip

It’s that easy! Now you can either ‘cd’ or click on your frontier, and away it should go!

The video is a bit wonky in that it seems to only work in 8 bit or 24bit depths. So far I’ve only tested this in WinArosDeveloper.

It actually works, the keyboard is buggy as hell, but you can play with the mouse. The first key code seems to work, then it gets stuck, so I recommend the ‘enter’ key so you can thrust…

I’ve published my zip up to The AROS Archives with any luck when it’s there I’ll update it with a link to it. In the mean time, I’ll provide a dump of the screen.c that I fixed to remove the OpenGL support. Naturally blogspot will screw up the formatting, however it should work…

While on the topic of Frontier Elite this week, I was wondering if they by any chance ever released the source code… It appears not, however there were largely two versions the original being in 68000 assembly then a port to 80286 real mode ASM.

Tom Morton has taken the Atari ST version of Frontier, and removed the hardware access from the assembly, then tweaked a m68k assembler to either output in C or i386 asm… So he’s basically reversed a copy of Frontier to allow it to run natively!

And he’s added OpenGL support to some degree! It’s VERY cool!

At a minimum I bet there are people out there that would LOVE this guys programs to convert m68k assembly listings into either C or i386 asm. Or a chance to hack the ‘source’ like crazy.

I was playing with DOSBox on an XP machine, and I came across this exciting link: http://www.eliteclub.co.uk/download/ You can now download Frontier II as shareware! Most cool, so I’ve downloaded it & just run it under DOSBox. No tweaks, answer for the SoundBlaster sound card, and away you go! Here is me attempting to do a flyby of the Saturn system..

This game was super cool back in the day for it’s realistic physics as you could do slingshots, flybys, orbits & even land on various moons & planets. There is nothing more exhilarating then flying through the solar system or the universe at hundreds of thousands of Km/s. Not to mention the hyper drive!

You can give it a shot too, if your browser is Java enabled! Just click right here, and enjoy!